Learning Vim, or, You Will Briefly Suck At Computers

I tried to type a document in a word processor the other day, only
to find the document littered with `:w` and `cw` commands.
Pages, where are your Vim bindings? Learning Vim (Vim can be replaced by
Emacs for most of this stuff) makes coding in it a breeze, and trying
to code without it a nightmare. It is definitely worth it to invest the
time to become proficient in a good editor, but I tried and failed
several times before finally getting it.

My problem with Vim was exactly what makes it so great: its depth and
power. I know you can just get by with `:w` to save, `:q` to quit,
`i` to enter insert mode, escape to exit, and the arrow keys to move
around, but I knew I was missing out on all that Vim had to offer, and
it bothered me. I would read a tutorial about macros or text objects or
autocmd or registers or marks and soon would be deep in the depths of
the vim help reading about something that I would never use.

I got so distracted by all that Vim could do that I never just sat down
and used what I needed to code. It finally clicked when I decided I was
okay not knowing how to use Vim, as long as I got incrementally more
comfortable with it. That freed me up to be terrible at it, but learn
little by little instead of all at once.

So if you have tried and failed to learn Vim, try again, but just
acknowledge that you will feel like your grandpa typing emails for a
while. Don’t get overwhelmed by the tutorials and books and
configurations. Start out simple. That is okay.

Here are some Vim resources that I found helpful. I revisit these every
so often and pick up new things from them. Don’t read them all at once,
and don’t learn them all at once.

Jamison cares about family and programming and React Rally and Soft Skills Engineering and 🏋️ and 🏂 and computing and business and the Dunning-Kreuger effect. He is a real human bean who you can reach on Twitter.